Four years ago, I suffered a slight case of euphoria in the passenger seat of my friend’s car. The lights of the highway tickled my eyes, and The Kinks’ “Lola,” blared from the speakers. I blared along with it, piecing together lines a full second after they started. In the moment, I had thought I was some born-again Bon Jovi. It wasn’t until the next morning that my friends informed me of just how terrible of a singer I’d been, and the high of my performance crumbled. The Kinks had betrayed me. Singing along to their song revealed, clear as day, how offbeat I was — Mr. Davies sang perfectly in tune, a sharp contrast to my inability to carry any melody. While I had to pause a second to remember a line, he needed no such help.
After that moment, my friends would constantly tease me for my singing voice, and I became fearful of singing along to music, especially around others. For a time, I had assumed shelter in the fact that I could hide beneath the speakers. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I became reluctant to sing with music, and even less willing to sing without it. Being quiet became my impromptu defense against ridicule and laughter. It took a while for this to change, and it wasn’t until four years later, when three friends and I hiked the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, that I felt comfortable singing again.
As we slowly made our way along the Appalachian Trail, we were besieged by 70-mile-per-hour winds, blurry mists and ringing hail. The night before, we crested the ridgeline, only to receive an emergency warning from the National Park Service advising backpackers to stay away. Heedless, we pushed onwards, lulled into a naive complacency by the iPhone weather app.
My friends and I had embarked on our excursion searching for a respite from Michigan’s cold weather — we never found it. Instead, we were alone, scared for our safety and freezing. Bizarrely enough, we found warmth in Noah Kahan and singing his lyrics.
We weren’t well-acquainted with his work. None of us were particularly avid listeners. He entered our collective lexicon after we discovered the concert Mr. Kahan would be holding in April for Zyn reward members. His music was sweet and acoustic, and we found it funny that he was playing for Zyn-heads — Zyns, compared to their more cancerous older brother, the cigarette, have a less romantic edge to them, and consequently Zyn users do as well.
In that freezing southern forest, I tried my best to embody Kahan, his wispy voice and halting delivery. His songs somehow communicated how cold my hands felt and the absurdity in not seeing the sun over spring break, while simultaneously providing a form of escapism. Not once did I think about how little I knew of his lyrics or the fact that I might get the tune wrong. Not once did I think of my friends judging me. Not only had my singing abilities improved drastically, more mysteriously I no longer felt shame singing in a group. Rather, I just accepted the meager respite singing provided. Obviously, something had changed.
Looking back, the impetus of this change were trips I went on into the wild, trips that separated me from recorded media. Without professional renditions of songs to rely upon or hide beneath, I developed a greater attention to detail and became a better singer. On windy trails overlooking stunning vistas, I had begun the slow process of learning to sing for myself, of acquiring more skills and discovering what those skills meant to me.
One of our companions during our Tennessee trip had never hiked before. In response to the river water we filled our water bottles with, he began singing this one line, over and over: “I’ve been drinking dirty water.” It was a line from a Foo Fighters song. Our friend couldn’t remember any other lines, and he could barely remember Dave Grohl’s delivery, but that didn’t matter. We transformed the line into our own creation. We collectively agreed that Grohl had most likely been singing about alcohol, but we reappropriated the meaning to only take it at face value. Because when we did, it almost perfectly addressed the situation we were in: The glamour we left behind for the wilderness and the pride we felt in that loss. When I sang this line, I growled it, trying to fill it to the brim with melodrama, imagining Grohl drenched in sweat and a black T-shirt. Emulating the metal side of the Foo Fighters, I would go low at “drinking,” only to come high again at “-ty,” higher at “wa-” then back down again at “-ter.” I strung out the syllables after I got to “dirty,” reveling in the gusto of them.
After we finished our trip and returned to our motel, I finally listened to the full song. Dave Grohl sang the line completely differently from me, quietly, almost hypnotically. Part of me hates this version of the song. I had learned how to use singing to make something my own, and it felt like Dave Grohl was trying to take that away from me.
Singing takes precedence over how much of the song you know. Lyrics, melody, rhythm, almost all of the building blocks of music have an incredible ability to distill difficult concepts into a mere moment in time. Sure, together they tell a more complex story, but sometimes only a single part of that story is needed. In my city life, I often find songs replacing my internal monologue. A line or two repeated incessantly until whatever idea it represents has been whittled away. For the life of me, I probably wouldn’t be able to name any other lyric, or the drumbeat, or the guitar riff, and that’s fine. By the state of my estrangement, I could only glean one magnanimous detail from the song, and I had to rely on myself to wring value from it.
Our renditions of “I’ve been drinking dirty water” evolved into a project to create our own version of the rest of the song. At first, we tried to carry the melody, but the Dave Grohl bridge drew us from the Foo Fighters to Nirvana. Continuously repeating the verse melody from “Something in the Way,” we crafted a narrative. The simple locality expressions like “outside of the tent” formed our base. Then objects, like the dirty tupperware we constantly ate out of (and never could fully clean) shaped our direction. We immortalized our friend, whom I accidentally spilled burning coffee on, running to the river to douse his burning foot. All of this laid over the harmonic dread of Nirvana. As we sang our song, the pain came alive, and it brought us joy. Our experience became richer and less dreadful.
We were creating because it was our only form of entertainment. We were left with simple building blocks — that one line, that one melody. From there, we were able to use our voices to not only make something, but also feel something. It didn’t matter how limited our sonic ranges were because we weren’t trying to match phenom rock stars. We were just trying to please ourselves.
My relationship with recorded music is still strained. I still get nervous singing along to songs, and I’m almost always unsure of the words. Yet when I don’t have music blaring, I sing bits and pieces of songs. I make up random vocal inflections or gibberish lyrics. I’m a singer again, just like I was out in the woods.
Daily Arts Writer Joe Bogdan can be reached at joebogdn@umich.edu.
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